Insobriety & Shadows

Last night, I went dancing.

Drinking is a required precursor.  I would like to get to the point where it's optional and I can get into an altered state for dancing without it.  But for now, it's simpler.  It allows me to trance out... it allows me to not dance TO the music, but let the music dance through me.  The experience is ecstatic and sacred to me.  I'll often say a short prayer ahead of time to Dionysos, dedicating my dancing to Him.

The drinks were really slow to kick in, though, which is what led to me going a bit overboard.  It's hard to keep a delicate balance with this sort of thing, which is sort of the point I suppose.  But I had a couple very interesting moments.  While I had my first couple drinks and just observed - myself, the music, the dance floor - I was able to feel the exact moment when my mind felt altered.  The sound of the music shifted subtley but suddenly.  (It actually sounded different in my ears.)  Or more accurately, I shifted into the music.  The feeling was "Oh, there it is..."

At another point, I was just listening while taking a break from dancing, and I felt as if I could hear the music beneath the music.  My senses could travel through the sound and noise and beat to the strains beneath, humming with the universe itself.  It was music broken down to its paradigm, not just sound but sound married to feeling and movement, and I named it automatically with a marveled recognition... I think I even whispered it outloud -- "longing".

I also remembered how I used to be so much more about the Goddess rather than the God.  I used to even feel trepidation about calling on or worshipping a "male" deity.  I thought, when did that change?  How did I get here?  When now it is nearly all about the God, or a certain god at least.  That may be an interesting topic for another blog.

I will not even try to describe the experience of dancing itself, I do not think I could.

I met some interesting people, though socializing is never a priority.  One interesting soul was not only well versed with my favorite bands, but was also pagan and devoted to Hecate.

Maybe Hecate herself even stepped in, because I ran into my shadow later at home -- and though I'm blessed to never have hangovers, I'm still recovering emotionally from that.  I'm not even sure how to begin integrating that experience, although there has to be something important there.  And even as I'm writing this, I find out that the one actual person that if I did meet would be like meeting my shadow (not by her nature but from a long, complex history of negative association), actually saw me at the club last night, though I did not see her.  What is the universe trying to tell me?  Or more importantly, what am I trying to tell myself?